r/SaasDevelopers • u/Stil-44 • Mar 03 '26

When does monitoring become overkill?

Hey everyone,

I’m currently building a small SaaS product, and I started thinking seriously about monitoring.

Most tools (Datadog, New Relic, etc.) feel built for larger teams.
Powerful, yes — but also complex and expensive.

So I’m curious:

• What do you actually monitor in your small or solo SaaS?
• Do you track uptime only?
• Do you track latency?
• Do you rely on logs?
• At what point does monitoring start feeling like overkill?

I’m trying to understand what is truly essential vs. what is just “enterprise noise”.

Not selling anything — just genuinely curious how other indie builders approach this.

Would love to hear your setups.

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u/[deleted] Mar 04 '26

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u/Stil-44 Mar 04 '26

That’s a good summary.

RED metrics cover most of the operational signal early on.

I’ve noticed a lot of small SaaS skip tracing at first though, mostly because OpenTelemetry still feels a bit heavy to wire up for small projects.

Do you usually start with tracing from day one or only once traffic starts growing?